This book argues that from the 1560s those Calvinist Englishmen charged with governing Ireland became frustrated by the failure of the local population to accept the Gospel and reap the fruits of God’s grace in the form of a truly civil, obedient, and reformed society. It was in order to overcome that failure that these New English began to employ the term ‘state’ in manuscript correspondence with each other and with their masters in England. These New Englishmen, Hutchinson contends, used the term to mean not just a coordinated network of territorially bounded offices exercising political power (the early modern state defined by Michael Braddick), but a fictive person distinct from both the people and the prince (the modern state defined by Quentin Skinner). Skinner’s modern state was also a secular entity, though Hutchinson is more ambivalent on his point (pp 4–5, 11). Hutchinson dates this innovative language of the state to the late 1570s, about a decade before the usage is accepted by John Guy to have appeared in England.

Hutchinson has read deeply in the state papers, and exposes many important facts. In particular, the defences of limited monarchy advanced by members of the Old English elite like Nicholas White and Nicholas Walsh in the 1580s run like a red thread through Hutchinson’s central chapters. His convincing analysis of these defences is supported by the valuable transcription of Walsh’s speech to the Irish House of Commons in May 1586 which he has published in Analecta Hibernica. This advocacy of limited monarchy in theory and practice appears to have amounted to a self-conscious political tradition: one of considerable significance. Hutchinson’s excavation of a wide variety of uses of the term ‘state’ in later sixteenth-century Ireland also provides much food for thought.

Nevertheless, there are weaknesses in Hutchinson’s argument. He insists that Protestant discourse on politics was very different to that carried on among other Christians, because all Protestants denied that humans were capable of good government unless God intervened, extending his grace to reform their consciences. He grounds this argument in an analysis of the short English-language treatises by John Ponet, Christopher Goodman, and John Aylmer, printed in the 1550s, which urged resistance against Queen Mary. First, Hutchinson’s account of the content of these texts is a little one-sided. For example, while Ponet did write that God was the author of political life among humans, he nonetheless argued that pagans (who lacked God’s grace) were capable of doing good things guided by natural reason and natural law alone. Second, it is hard to situate these arguments in our wider knowledge of English culture. Luca Baschera has indeed taught us that, apart from Hutchinson’s pamphleteers, there were several Calvinist scholastics, received in the English universities, who insisted that only the regenerate recipients of God’s saving grace were capable of good political action. But it seems unlikely that the majority of the English Protestant elite subscribed unambiguously to that view. Had they done so, their deep attachment to classical culture – Cicero in grammar school, Aristotle in university – would be very hard to understand. Where do those Protestant Thomists who were optimistic about the human ability to establish worthwhile political relationships without God’s direct intervention, like Richard Hooker, fit into Hutchinson’s scheme?

Hutchinson never defines what he means by either grace or conscience. Many Protestant theologians distinguished between gratia gratum faciens, the saving grace which sanctified the Elect, and gratia gratis data, the grace by which a minister, superior, or inferior magistrate exercised God-given power, despite themselves lacking saving grace. The Emperor Nero might thus possess the type of grace that allowed him to govern (as St Paul indicated) but not the type of grace that would grant eternal life. The problem with Hutchinson’s undifferentiated approach is that it suggests that all English Protestants were Anabaptists like John of Leiden or Fifth Monarchists like Thomas Harrison. These extremists were understood by contemporaries to ground dominium in grace; that is, to hold that those in a state of sin rather than grace could not own property or exercise political power. Since it was impossible to tell who was in a state of grace or sin, those who grounded dominium in grace would have been unable to tell whether magistrates’ decisions were lawful, which would have made human government impossible. The English Protestants charged by Elizabeth I with governing Ireland in the later sixteenth century were surely quite different to Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchists.

Hutchinson’s arguments on the state are closely wedded to Quentin Skinner’s model and conclusions. Hutchinson offers his readers no historiographical treatment of ‘the state’ before Skinner, and no treatment of alternatives to or criticisms of Skinner’s model (no Otto von Gierke, no F. W. Maitland, no Michael Oakeshott). And Skinner’s arguments, as developed by Hutchinson, present the reader with a chronological puzzle: the doubly-impersonal state, apparently invented in Ireland in the 1570s, in fact played a role in seventeenth-century British and Irish political discourse profoundly subordinate to other concepts like king, people, and corporation.

This is a vigorously argued book that tackles questions of the highest importance. Hutchinson’s current arguments on political Protestantism and the state are not wholly convincing: he will hopefully develop them further in the future. By contrast, his work on the Old English and limited monarchy greatly enriches our knowledge of early modern Irish political discourse.